Canada: First Muslim Refugee To Become A Cabinet Member Faked Her Background

The background of any government official that cannot be verified should not be allowed to hold office.

Once upon a time

The girl who fled Afghanistan by donkey and camel and jet plane and who remembers being greeted in this country by helping hands and the sound of robins singing, and today, she serves in this chamber and in the cabinet because Canada is her home. Obama speech to house of commons

MP Maryam Monsef story is a fairy tale – a lie.

Robert Fife of the Globe and Mail inquired about her early life and found shocking lies. Monsef was in fact born in the Iranian city of Mashahd and not in Herat, Afghanistan. She was born and lived until age 9 in Iran.

Democratic Reform Minister Maryam Monsef, whom the Liberals have championed as this country’s first Afghan-born MP, says she was actually born and lived most of her early life in Iran before arriving with her mother and two younger sisters in Canada as refugees.

This revelation contradicts a key narrative that Ms. Monsef has built ever since she entered public life as a local politician in Peterborough, Ont., and when she ran for Parliament in the 2015 election. theglobeandmail

The Prime Minister’s office learned about this from the newspaper nearly a year after Monsef’s appointment.

The Prime Minister’s Office said it had no idea that such a fundamental feature of Ms. Monsef’s life story was wrong. Officials scrambled to put together a detailed timeline of her family’s life in Iran and Afghanistan and the journey to Canada.

When asked why security vetting for cabinet posts didn’t uncover this error, an official said “we learned of this information about Maryam Monsef’s place of birth when it was brought to us recently by the The Globe and Mail.” theglobeandmail

The Canadian government also seems to have an immigrate vetting problem.

Opposition MPs were reluctant to question Ms. Monsef’s explanation for why she never knew where she was born, but asked why her Iranian birthplace was not discovered during the cabinet vetting process by the Privy Council and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. theglobeandmail

Step Down

Tory leadership candidate Tony Clement has suggested Monsef step asidepending “more of an investigation” of the mix-up and how the government failed to learn of Monsef’s true birthplace when she was being vetted. Vice

Monsef blaming her mom and justifies her mom’s false statements to immigration officials.

“In the last few days, my neat and tidy refugee story has proven to be a bit more complicated than I originally thought. [The Globe’s] inquiry led me to have a conversation with my mom and I have since found, while I am still an Afghan citizen, I was born in a hospital in Iran,” she said. theglobeandmail

Minister of Democratic Institutions, Maryam Monsef, implicitly justifies her mother’s decision in 1996 to provide false information verbally and written about her daughter’s birthplace in order to receive a refugee status in Canada. cijnews

Attempts to dismiss concerns over Monsef’s apparently unverifiable history by Aisha Ahmad, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the director of the Islam and Politics Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs.